Samuel Morgenstern, an Austrian businessman and a business partner of the young Hitler in his Vienna period, bought many of the young Hitler’s paintings. According to Morgenstern, Hitler came to him for the first time in the beginning of the 1910s, either in 1911 or in 1912. When Hitler came to Morgenstern’s glazier store for the first time, he offered Morgenstern three of his paintings. Morgenstern kept a database of his clientele, through which it had been possible to locate the buyers of young Hitler’s paintings. It is found that the majority of the buyers were Jewish. An important client of Morgenstern, a prosecuting lawyer by the name of Josef Feingold,another Jewish Business man, bought a series of paintings by Hitler depicting old Vienna.

Samuel Morgenstern was born in Budapest in 1875. In 1903 he opened his glazier store with a workshop in the back at 4 Liechtenstein-strasse near downtown Vienna, quite close to Sigmund Freud’s practice and apartment.

In 1904 he married Emma Pragan, a Jew from Vienna.

In a deposition he made from memory in 1937, Morgenstern stated that Hitler had come to his store for the first time in 1911 or 1912, offering him three paintings, historical views in the style of Rudolf von Alt. Morgenstern had also sold pictures in his frame and glazier store, “since in my experience it is easier to sell frames if they contain pictures.

After the annexation of Austria in March 1938 as leader of the “Greater German Empire,” Mr. and Mrs.Morgenstern’s destiny made a turn for the worst. In the fall of 1938 their stores, fully stocked warehouse, and workshop were “Aryanized” and taken over by a National Socialist. The “purchase price,” which was set at 620 marks, was never paid. Because Morgenstern also lost his commercial license, he was no longer allowed to work. Thus the couple- sixty-three and fifty-nine years old, respectively-had no income whatever, and what is more: they could not leave the country, because they did not have the money either for the trip or for the obligatory “Reich flight tax,” or for the required visa.

In this desperate situation Samuel Morgenstern saw only one way out: asking the Fuhrer personally for help, just as Dr. Bloch,Bloch was the physician of Adolf Hitler’s family, in Linz did around that time.

Considering that Hitler immediately responded to Bloch’s request, Morgenstern’s hope for the Fuhrer to intervene and save his life was certainly not absurd, as long as the letter reached Hitler.

Morgenstern’s letter went on the following journey: mailed in Vienna on August 11, it arrived in Hider’s secretary’s office at the Obersalzberg in Berchtesgaden on August 12 and was forwarded from there to the “Fuhrer’s Chancellery” in Berlin on August 14, where it was opened on August 15. This is where the marginal note “Jew!” must have been added. In any case, the secretary’s office did not hand the letter to Hider but returned it to Vienna on August 19 however, not to the sender but to the Finance Ministry, where it was filed away and forgotten for the next fifty-six years.

The invasion of Poland began on September 1, 1939, and with it World War II. The Morgensterns waited fruitlessly for help from Hitler, but a short time later their house was taken from them. They had to relocate to a kind of Jewish ghetto in Leopoldstadt. From there, on October 28, 1941, they were deported to the Litzmannstadt ghetto in the Reich district of Wartheland. The deportation order was stamped, in red ink, “To Poland.”

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The Morgensterns were among 25,000 Jews deported to Litzmannstadt(AKA Lodz) from Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Frankfurt, Cologne, Hamburg, Dusseldorf, and Luxembourg.

Samuel Morgenstern died of exhaustion in the ghetto of Litzmannstadt in August 1943. He was sixty-eight years old. He was buried in the ghetto cemetery. As an eyewitness, Emma’s brother-in-law Wilhelm Abeles, a former glazier in Vienna, was to report later on, his wife was with him until the end.

Emma Morgenstern must have been deported to Auschwitz by August 1944, for on August 30 only a “cleaning-up commando” of six hundred men and a few people in hiding remained in the ghetto. Most new arrivals-above all, old women unable to work-were immediately sent to the gas chamber .